For My Sins
by Random-Battlecry
Summary: Nevermind that agents of his rank had the life expectancy of gnats. As far as he was concerned, everything after the first kill was anticlimax. Post Casino Royale. Oneshot.


**A/N: An unexpected one-shot. No real explicit spoilers but it won't make a whole lot of sense if you haven't seen the new Casino Royale. Anyway, bravo to whoever took a look at the sad-monkey-face of the present 007 and went, "Yes! _There's_ the man for the job!" You were right.**

**For My Sins**

No; he hadn't thought about it. It was only in the last and final throes of his conscience— much, much later, halfway in fact through the next assignment— that he allowed M's words to pass through his mind again. He'd kept them successfully at bay, hidden behind typical directives— eat sleep breathe run shoot— that marched across the computer of his brain, neat little letters, emphatic in their very starkness, white text on a black screen. Behind it all, a small blip of conscience, nothing on the radar, on its way out, a momentary aberration.

There was nothing much to the fundamental question (What went through her mind, as she lost that last breath?) but it carried such worlds of mystery that he toyed with the idea, given the chance, of how many years of his life he'd trade in order to find out. Nevermind that agents of his rank had the life expectancy of gnats. As far as he was concerned, everything after the first kill was anticlimax. And what was so dangerous about anticlimax? Nothing, that's what. Nothing but the boredom.

He wanted to know what she was thinking, but he was quite sure that he already did. No one wants to die. She hadn't wanted to die. She had been thinking, Please, don't let me die, James, don't let me die.

Killing, he discovered, was not cathartic. By the time her final actions were fully uncovered in his mind (it took a while. The wind blew the sand off the memory, and he stood there on the beach with a half-buttoned shirt and a shovel and patiently tried to fill it back in) he'd finished that next job and was on a train, headed for a taxi, that was headed for a bus, that was headed for a plane that was headed for London. He'd earned a week's respite, according to M.

What would he want a week's respite for, he'd said.

To slow down, she'd told him. To think. Its a job.

Its a life, he'd said, not thinking or not caring at the time how pathetic that sounded, but he took the week, was taking the week, because he needed to get back to suave and debonair and it was markedly difficult to do so with staples in his face. The wounds needed to heal.

Here he was going back to London, a home in a multitude of homes, bed in a multitude of beds, and his flat would be cold and empty and even by poking repeatedly at the thought of that, the knowledge of it, he couldn't make himself care.

Killing was not cathartic. Death was not cathartic; there was nothing clean. Sex was cathartic after a fashion, inasmuch as it was anything more than part of the job description, but that too was messy. Love was even less cathartic than death.

It was when he thought this, about love and death, that the shovel dropped from his nerveless mental hand and the wind gleefully whipped free the last of the covering over Vesper's memory. It unfolded like a flower, like pain, like blood from a wound in his mind.

He'd thought at the time that her beauty reflected even from him, but there was nothing lovely about the way he felt; stomach cramped and muscles spasmed, his head felt as though it would explode and he reached one dead, dull hand up, slowly, to touch his aching temples in the echo of a stranger's tell. Flashes of pain, flashes of light, flashes of red-edged pleasure so intense he felt sucked in through his mind, out through his eyeballs, and back in the past: a day at the beach house, healing bruises and her trying eagerly to kiss the memory of torture away.

He wasn't there, and the ghost of Vesper danced with the ghost of himself.

There are all sorts of cliches for this sort of thing, all a variation on Let the past bury its dead. There are no funeral services held for memories.

He drummed his fingertips on his temple, created an echo, a distillation in his brain, was spat out quite suddenly into the present and the now. He decided instantly that her tell was too much the facade of honesty, of looking into his eyes and saying she wasn't afraid of the cool emotionless intelligence she saw there, the trounced-on ecstacy of breathing, the blood-fed ego. She hadn't died for him, no. Nor because of him.

Hadn't he been presented with a choice of who she'd die by, and hadn't the first words out of his mouth been:

Allow me.

He was getting very good at being cold. It helped that his eyes were windows to nothing less and nothing more than an iceberg, reflecting blue so many times that it lost color almost entirely.

It was a long week of healing, all he had to look forward to, but he was certain he could mitigate it somewhat. His was a practiced charm, displayed in a mirror till the reflection was more authentic than the original, and he smiled to himself and tweaked his little finger, went out to some dark-haired woman and made her life merry hell for a fortnight.

He was able to forget that she had seen something in him worth saving.


End file.
